Upgrading from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 with yum

A new release of Fedora is out again so it is time to check out the upgrade. This time it is the Fedora 9 release. The upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 is almost exactly like the upgrade to Fedora 8. Here are the steps you need to do the upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9:

As someone points out in the comments there is a new facility to do upgrades that you can install. See the following wiki entry about the PreUpgrade. I tried to use PreUpgrade but it didn’t install the update boot option for some reason but maybe others will have better luck.

  1. yum update
  2. yum clean all
  3. I like to repeated update and clean all a second time to make sure everything got updated
  4. Run the following command to update the yum repo on your box:
    [code lang=”text”]
    rpm -Uhv http://mirror.liberty.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-9-2.noarch.rpm http://mirror.liberty.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-9.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
    [/code]
  5. Next I had to do a “yum clean all” again before it picked up the change
  6. Next do a yum -y update
  7. As in the past, a few packages had to be removed to get the dependencies to work out. In this case I had to remove the beryl-manager, VirtualBox and cups. In the case of cups I noted what got removed so I could re-install it later.
  8. The packages have grown a little and this time I had to wait for 1.4G of packages to download and install. After an hour or so it was ready for a reboot.
  9. After a reboot I had problems getting my NVIDIA driver to load. I ended up having to download the latest beta version of the driver per this forum post: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=111460
  10. I recompiled my NVIDIA driver and then added the flag for X suggested in the forum. GDM wouldn’t start because the flag was set there but I can live with that.
  11. Now I have X but I’ve run into a number of issues getting apps to run correctly. For example firefox won’t start without the –sync option. At this point I think it will just be a matter of time before things get worked out, until then I’m just going to wait it out. At least it boots and mostly works.

Update: I think I may have found one of the issues with X and that is the fonts changed in Fedora 9. See Fedora 9 Fonts. I re-added the old fonts and now apps are starting correctly.

[tags]linux, fedora[/tags]

34 thoughts on “Upgrading from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 with yum”

  3. wtfnix

    hehe yeah when you said the words “almost exactly” I said yeah went exactly back to core 8 :P It would of been funny to see everyone wondering why they couldn’t upgrade :D

  4. Laust

    could you say which fonts you installed exactly? I’m asking since i’ve just updated from 8 to 9 and am experiencing the same issues with apps crashing (or not starting)

  5. david

    I’m having issues with X also. Apps not starting, non-movable windows with no borders etc. Do you have more detailed info as to how you rectified this??

  6. MrsVeteran

    Heya! First, thanks so much for doing these upgrade howto’s. They’ve saved me a lot of time.

    Second — can you tell me which exact font package(s) you had to add back in? Did you go back to the previous DejaVu, for example, or did you just re-add ones that were dropped? Haven’t rebooted to 9 yet, and wanted to try to make sure I got everything first.

    Thanks again for putting these together!

  7. Pingback: all these things that i’ve done » Fedora 9 Install by YUM

  8. wtfnix

    If people have issues, why not post your logs and errors that show up within your log file. Other’s cant read your mind :P

  9. matt

    Thanks for the post … now if only I could get the NVidia drivers for Fedora Core 9 to work. Wasted most of the day at work jerking around trying to get X to start. :((

  11. Anthony

    I’m having the problem with firefox (named color or font does not exist).

    Which old font packages did you reinstall?

  12. Anthony

    I just got it to work:

    as root:

    # yum install xorg-x11-fonts-\*

    # service xfs restart

  13. Deepak

    Thanks Carson, your info is very helpful.

    Last night I upgraded my Fedora 8 box. Got a smoother installation and no need to remove any package for dependencies (even Cups got updated).

    After rebooting only have some acl problems as squid updated to newer version 3.0.STABLE2-3.fc9.x86_64

  14. Frank D Gunseor

    A flawless upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 using yum, but…
    after reboot nothing works.
    FireFox starts then closes as do most of the applications.
    Konqueror works, somewhat.
    Terminal works.
    Any suggestions to get my system back to normal would be appreciated?

    Thank you

    Frank D Gunseor

  15. Setya

    Hi,

    I’ve just installed Fedora 7, can I skip 8 and just upgrade to 9 ?

    Regards,

    Setya

  16. Pingback: Babble On » Blog Archive » Fedora 9 on EC2

  17. Babble On

    I got fed up of using the default Fedora 8 AMI with EC2 due to a bug in MySQL and gave your instructions a try. The upgrade was smooth and error-free and my Fedora 9 image has been a joy to use. Thank you!

  18. Babble On

    Actually, to get things working with the 64-bit Fedora 8 AMI I had to enter the following before upgrading to the new release:

    rpm -e –nodeps curl.x86_64 curl.i386

  19. Jim

    FWIW Preupgrade failed completely on my system. Didn’t update the kernel, etc. etc.

    Booted Ubuntu and used the procedure described here to recover. Basically the mess left by preupgrade took a day out of my life. Never again, just yum from now on.

    To the folks with X problems. Unless you have some very obscure requirements, you can kill xfs. You can even:

    yum remove xfs

    to remove it completely and the system works better.

    There are plenty of things that I like less in FC9, especially the ugly X login screen and I still have to play with feature like non-working power management which leaves the laptop backlight on all the time.

    Spell checking in web forms doesn’t work (just realized this typing here).

  20. althoffm

    Not that easy as from 7 to 8. I will post my notes here in case someone else gets into the same mess.

    Error: Missing Dependency: curl = 7.18.2-1.fc8 is needed by package curl-devel
    Error: Missing Dependency: libssl.so.6 is needed by package ckermit
    Error: Missing Dependency: libcrypto.so.6 is needed by package dhcpv6_client
    Error: Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.8) is needed by package newt-perl
    Error: Missing Dependency: libcrypto.so.6 is needed by package ckermit
    Error: Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.8) is needed by package perl-DateManip

    This one was easy : yum remove curl-devel ckermit dhcpv6_client newt-perl DateManip

    Running rpm_check_debug
    ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve:
    Package initscripts needs /sbin/pidof, this is not available.
    Package cdecl needs libtermcap.so.2, this is not available.
    Package chkfontpath needs /sbin/pidof, this is not available.
    Complete!

    Removed cdecl and chkfontpath.

    The initscripts needs /sbin/pidof, this is not available was a bit more trouble there was hardly any relevant information on the net but
    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/IA64/Workarounds#yum_update_complains:_initscripts_needs_.2Fsbin.2Fpidof.2C_this_is_not_available..22

    This sites has the following steps:

    rpm -e sysvinit –nodeps
    yum install sysvinit-tools
    yum install event-compat-sysv (did not exist)

    Installed sysvinit again using : yum install sysvinit

    Okay almost there but then:

    Transaction Check Error:
    file /usr/sbin/vipw from install of shadow-utils-4.1.1-2.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package util-linux-2.13-0.54.1.fc7.i386
    file /usr/share/man/man8/vipw.8.gz from install of shadow-utils-4.1.1-2.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package util-linux-2.13-0.54.1.fc7.i386

    Odd there was a FC7 util-linux still hanging somewhere. I removed this one using rpm –e util-linux –nodeps and installed it again using yum install util-linux. (do not use ‘yum remove’ the package has a dep link to over 100 system critical packages!)

    Ran the transaction again and yeah about 1400 packages where updated time for coffee… After the completed message I installed the packages removed by hand and ran the ‘yum update’ then rebooted and it came up again just fine.

  26. Pingback: Upgrading from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 with yum @ IONCANNON

  27. Jim

    I’ve used your instructions before and they always worked out great! Thanks! Usually I use Debian, but I’m having trouble with the Apache2 server. I used to run 2 har drives one with fedora and the other with debian, but I changed the fedora to win xp and now I am re installing fedora on another machine, because I know more about running apache in fedora. Thanks again!

  28. SToGE

    Your instructions seem to be very helpful thus far. I did run into an issue though and was wondering if someone can give me some guidance.

    I was able to successfully run through steps 1-5 and got to step 6 where I did ‘yum -y update’ using the FC9 repos. My problem is that I got a TON of missing dependencies. Should I go through line by line and ‘yum remove’ each package and reinstall them again after getting to FC9 or is there a better solution? I am talking about close to 100 missing dependencies or so.

    Thanks for your help!

  29. Chris Northwood

    SToGE: I’ve found that before the yum -y update, I needed to “yum update fedora-release” in order to get the new signing key and the -newkey repositories.

  30. Ryan Chapman

    when i do ‘yum update’ i get this:

    Transaction Check Error:
    file /usr/share/desktop-directories/Internet.directory from install of gnome-menus-2.20.1-1.fc8 conflicts with file from package xfdesktop-acer-lp-1652.mcs_patched
    file /usr/share/desktop-directories/Settings.directory from install of gnome-menus-2.20.1-1.fc8 conflicts with file from package xfdesktop-acer-lp-1652.mcs_patched

    Error Summary

    any ideas guys?

  31. carson Post author

    You may need to remove one of those packages before trying to update. I would guess that you have a special xfdesktop package installed that you may be able to remove without too much pain and then re-install after the upgrade. Just make sure to back up any configuration.

  34. Luca

    Here are the fixes I had to do in my case:

    To fix the Error: Missing Dependency: libssl.so.6

    > rpm -e –nodeps openssl openldap
    > yum install openssl openldap

    To fix the Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.8)

    > yum remove libpurple spamassassin rrdtool frysk foomatic perl-IO-Socket-SSL

    the ones above where all the packages giving a dependency error on perl.

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